Toll the Hounds

‘Lord of this, Son of that, it’s no matter, izzit?’ The man peeled the last of the rind from the fruit with his thumb-knife, then flung it out on to the cobbles. ‘Point is,’ he continued to his companions, ‘he ain’t even human, is he? Just another of ’em hoary black-skinned demons, as dead-eyed as all the rest.’

‘Big on husking the world, aren’t ya?’ the second man at the table said, winking across at the third man, who’d yet to say a thing.

‘Big on lotsa things, you better believe it,’ the first man muttered, now cutting slices of the fruit and lifting each one to his mouth balanced on the blade.

The waiter drew close at that moment to edge up the wick in the lantern on the table, then vanished into the gloom once more.

The three were seated at one of the new street-side restaurants, although ‘restaurant’ was perhaps too noble a word for this rough line of tables and unmatched wooden chairs. The kitchen was little more than a converted cart and a stretch of canvas roof beneath which a family laboured round a grill that had once been a horse trough.

Of the four tables, three were occupied. All humans — the Tiste Andii were not wont to take meals in public, much less engage in idle chatter over steaming mugs of Bastion kelyk, a pungent brew growing in popularity in Black Coral.

‘You like to talk,’ the second man prodded, reaching for his cup. ‘But words never dug a ditch.’

‘I ain’t alone in being in the right about this,’ the first man retorted. ‘Ain’t alone at all. It’s plain that if the Lord Son was dead and gone, all this damned darkness would go away, an’ we’d be back to normal wi’ day ’n’ night again.’

‘No guarantees of that,’ the third man said, his tone that of someone half asleep.

‘It’s plain, I said. Plain, an’ if you can’t see that, it’s your problem, not ours.’

‘Ours?’

‘Aye, just that.’

‘Plan on sticking that rind-snicker through his heart, then?’

The second man grunted a laugh.

‘They may live long,’ the first man said in a low grumble, ‘but they bleed like anybody else.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ the third man said, fighting a yawn, ‘you’re the mastermind behind what you’re talking about, Bucch.’

‘Not me,’ the first man, Bucch, allowed, ‘but I was among the first t’give my word an’ swear on it.’

‘So who is?’

‘Can’t say. Don’t know. That’s how they organize these things.’

The second man was now scratching the stubble on his jaw. ‘Y’know,’ he ventured, ‘it’s not like there’s a million of ’em, is it? Why, half the adults among us was soldiers in the Domin, or even before. And nobody took our weapons or armour, did they?’

‘Bigger fools them,’ Bucch said, nodding. ‘Arrogance like that, they should pay for, I say.’

‘When’s the next meeting?’ the second man asked.

The third man stirred from his slouch on his chair. ‘We were just off for that, Harak. You want to come along?’

As the three men rose and walked off, Seerdomin finished the last of his kelyk, waited another half-dozen heartbeats, and then rose, drawing his cloak round him, even as he reached beneath it and loosened the sword in its scabbard.

He paused, then, and formally faced north. Closing his eyes, he spoke a soft prayer.

Then, walking with a careless stride he set off, more or less in the direction the three men were taking,

High on the tower, a red-scaled dragon’s eyes looked down upon all, facets reflecting scenes from every street, every alley, the flurry of activity in the markets, the women and children appearing on flat rooftops to hang laundry, figures wandering here and there between buildings. In those eyes, the city seethed.

Somewhere, beyond Night, the sun unleashed a morning of brazen, heady heat. It gave form to the smoke of hearth fires in the makeshift camps alongside the beaten tracks wending down from the north, until the pilgrims emerged to form an unbroken line on the trails, and then it lit into bright gold a serpent of dust that rode the winds all the way to the Great Barrow.

The destitute among them carried shiny shells collected from shoreline and tidal pools, or polished stones or nuggets of raw copper. The better off carried jewellery, gem-studded scabbards, strips of rare silk, Delantine linen, Daru councils of silver and gold, loot collected from corpses on battlefields, locks of hair from revered relatives and imagined heroes, or any of countless other items of value. Now within a day’s march of the Great Barrow, the threat of bandits and thieves had vanished, and the pilgrims sang as they walked towards the vast, descended cloud of darkness to the south.

Beneath that enormous barrow of treasure, they all knew, lay the mortal remains of the Redeemer.

Protected for ever more by Night and its grim, silent sentinels.

The serpent of dust journeyed, then, to a place of salvation.

Among the Rhivi of North Genabackis, there was a saying. A man who stirs awake the serpent is a man without fear. A man without fear has forgotten the rules of life.